14 Introduction
their status as Russian subjects, and loyalty to the tsar. However, we should be
more circumspect. Many Muslims were surely grateful to receive Russian pro-
tection while making the hajj, but there is little reason to think that the experi-
ence transformed their attitudes toward the tsar or the empire. More likely,
their willingness to make use of Russian services, and the gratitude they
expressed in writing, are evidence of their resourcefulness in mobilizing their
status as Russian subjects when it suited them, and when they needed protec-
tion or help.
Whatever their true feelings about Russia’s involvement in the hajj, pilgrims
effectively assisted Russia in constructing its hajj infrastructure by appearing at
its consulates, availing themselves of Russian services, and taking Russian rail-
roads and steamships to make the pilgrimage. By the eve of World War I, Rus-
sia and other European powers were involved in virtually all aspects of the hajj,
even in Ottoman Arabia. In Jeddah, the Dutch had set up a multi-service “Hajj
Bureau,” the British ran a medical dispensary out of their consulate (run by the
vice-consul, a Muslim doctor and British subject from India), and European
doctors and nurses staffed quarantine facilities set up to screen hajj pilgrims in
El Tor (at the bottom of the Sinai peninsula) and on Kamaran Island (in the Red
Sea).^26 Most Muslims would have found it impossible to make the Meccan pil-
grimage in this era without interacting with European officials. This state of
affairs shocked and dismayed many Muslim observers, who did not expect to
be greeted in Ottoman Arabia by Europeans. Abdürreşid Ibrahim, the Pan-
Islamic intellectual and activist from Russia, was surprised when he showed up
at the quarantine station on Kamaran Island in 1908, and was greeted at the
door of the disinfection building by a Christian woman. “Are we not in Otto-
man territory?” his equally stunned companion asked him, to which he replied,
“I don’t know.”^27
For Ibrahim, Russian and European involvement in the hajj was inconsistent
and unwelcome: he, like other Muslim intellectuals, saw it as a contravention of
Muslim religion, tradition, and history, and as a thinly veiled attempt to colonize
Ottoman Arabia. Interestingly, some Russian officials would have agreed. At a
time of growing uneasiness about Pan-Islamic threats to the empire, as well as
fears of the erosion of Orthodoxy’s privileged place in the empire, some pushed
for the tsarist regime to disengage from the hajj and withdraw its support. But
this was a minority opinion. A greater contingent within the regime saw benefit
for Russia in sponsoring the hajj.